Capstone – #4 Answering My Main Inquiry Question
For Capstone, since I’m researching about Genetics and why I have red hair, I chose my main inquiry question to be, “Why do I have red hair?” Since Genetics is a complicated topic and answering this question is also complicated, it took me quite a while to find the right answer and understand it well. Some challenges I had coming up with my main inquiry questions were I had to think of a question that had to do with my topic but wasn’t to broad and a lot of my questions that I came up with before my final one were too broad. That was something that really stumped me.
The answer to my question, “Why do I have red hair?” is, my dad and my mom carried the gene so that means that my sister and I each had a 25% chance of getting red hair and I got lucky and got it! The Punnett Square below shows my chances of getting red hair:
The uppercase b is brown hair and the lowercase b is red hair. My dad carries the gene for red and brown hair and my mom carries the gene for red and brown hair too. Two of the boxes have the gene for brown and red hair. One of the boxes has the gene for just brown hair and the last box has the gene for just red hair. If that’s the case, then one of your offspring could have red hair. If all of the boxes have only the genes for red hair (small b’s) then there is a 100% chance your offspring will get red hair. Since only 1 box has both recessive red hair genes, then there is a 25% chance for one of your offspring getting red hair and there is a 75% chance you are getting brown hair. This is why I got red hair.
